maven parent pom broken in gradle

I found that one of my POMs works fine if I remove the <parent> section. My parent pom is very simple. When I copy its contents directly into the project, the build also succeeds. It seems to be the use of <parent> itself that causes the problem.

My parent pom looks like this:

    <project>
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
      <groupId>com.example</groupId>
      <artifactId>example</artifactId>
      <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
      <packaging>pom</packaging>

      <properties>
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
      </properties>

      <distributionManagement>
        <repository>
          <id>releases</id>
          <url>http://corp.repo/content/repositories/releases</url>
        </repository>
        <snapshotRepository>
           <id>snapshots</id>
           <url>http://corp.repo/content/repositories/snapshots</url>
        </snapshotRepository>
      </distributionManagement>
    </project>

and it is being included like this:

    <parent>
        <groupId>com.example</groupId>
        <artifactId>example</artifactId>
        <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </parent>